Giovanni Massa can be considered one of the greatest performers of the art of scagliola in the Emilian area, his works adorn a large number of churches and sacred places but, given the fame he acheved in life, there are also numerous works carried out for important private individuals throughout northern Italy. The table top depicted here belongs to the more mature period of Massa's work, characterized by a very high degree of technical and qualitative perfection and bya aconception of the prospective composition in which the sacred subject tends to disappear in favour of views with architectures of metaphysical and scenographic spatiality. The sacred is therefore symbolically depicted as a fusion of the natural landscape with the work og man, architecture and ancient riuns. Thi top can be compared with the one located in the Chiesa di San Bernardino in Carpi and dated 1728.
